Different electrical and electronic equipment and their devices communicate between them through physical connectors and cables. Each device and/or apparatus may have specific connectivity requirements. Connectivity requirements could relate to physical connectivity between devices and to the communication protocol. Physical connectivity requirements could include a range of amplitude of current and/or voltage, Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) protection and others. A cable is most frequently used to connect between different electric and electronic devices.
The cable is usually one or more wires running side by side. The wires can be bonded, twisted, or braided together to form a single assembly. Every current-carrying conductor, including a cable, radiates an electromagnetic field. Likewise, any conductor or cable will pick up electromagnetic energy from any existing around electromagnetic field. This causes losses of transmitted energy and adversely affects electronic equipment or devices of the same equipment, since the noise picked-up is masking the desired signal being carried by the cable.
There are particular cable designs that minimize EMI pickup and transmission. The main design techniques include electromagnetic cable shielding, coaxial cable geometry, and twisted-pair cable geometry. Shielding makes use of the electrical principle of the Faraday cage. The cable is encased for its entire length in a metal foil or a metal wire mesh (shield). The metal could be such as aluminum or copper.
Coaxial cable design reduces electromagnetic transmission and pickup. In this design the current conductors are surrounded a tubular current conducting metal shield which could be a metal foil or a mesh. The foil or mesh shield has a circular cross section with the electric current conductors located at its center. This causes the voltages induced by a magnetic field between the shield and the conductors to consist of two nearly equal magnitudes which cancel each other. To reduce or prevent electromagnetic interference, other types of cables could also include an electromagnetic shield.
Cable assembly is a process that includes coupling of cut to measure individual wires or pair of wires and a metal foil shield into an electrical cable. Connectors terminate one or both ends of the cable. Individual wires are stripped from the isolation and soldered to connector pins. If the cable contains a metal foil shield, the shield has to be at least partially removed to allow unobstructed access to the individual wires and pins.
At present at least the metal shield removal is performed manually with the help of a knife or a cutter that cut the shield. The cut segment of the metal shield is manually removed or separated from the remaining part of the electric cable. In some occasions the current conducting wires are damaged by the cutting tools. Such manual operation is slow, inaccurate, prone to error and costly.